Modernity, Minority, and the Public Sphere Leiden Studies in Islam and Society Editors Léon Buskens (Leiden University) Petra M. Sijpesteijn (Leiden University) Editorial Board Maurits Berger (Leiden University) – R. Michael Feener (Oxford University) – Nico Kaptein (Leiden University) Jan Michiel Otto (Leiden University) – David S. Powers (Cornell University) volume 4 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/lsis Modernity, Minority, and the Public Sphere Jews and Christians in the Middle East Edited by S.R. Goldstein-Sabbah H.L. Murre-van den Berg leiden | boston This is an open access title distributed under the terms of the cc-by-nc License, which permits any non-commercial use, and distribution, provided no alterations are made and the original author(s) and source are credited. We wish to thank the nwo in particular for their support in providing the funding for language editing and making the volume available in Open Access so that our work can be shared with the larger academic community. Cover illustration: The Funeral of King Hussein, Jerusalem, June 4, 1931, American Colony (Jerusalem). Photo Dept., photographer, lc-m32- 50380-x [p&p], Repository: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Goldstein-Sabbah, S. R., editor | Murre-van den Berg, H. L. (Hendrika Lena), 1964- editor. Title: Modernity, minority, and the public sphere : Jews and Christians in the Middle East / edited by S.R. Goldstein-Sabbah, H.L. Murre-van den Berg. Other titles: Leiden studies in Islam and society ; v. 4. Description: Leiden : Brill, 2016. | Series: Leiden studies in Islam and society ; volume 4 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016018308 (print) | LCCN 2016024319 (ebook) | ISBN 9789004322905 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9789004323285 (E-book) Subjects: LCSH: Religious minorities–Middle East–Congresses. | Minorities–Middle East–Congresses. | Jews–Middle East–Congresses. | Christians–Middle East–Congresses. | Muslims–Middle East–Congresses. | Middle East–Ethnic relations–Congresses. Classification: LCC DS58 .M64 2016 (print) | LCC DS58 (ebook) | DDC 305.6/70956–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016018308 Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 2210-8920 isbn 978-90-04-32290-5 (paperback) isbn 978-90-04-32328-5 (e-book) Copyright 2016 by the Editors and Authors. This work is published by Koninklijke Brill nv. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. Koninklijke Brill nv reserves the right to protect the publication against unauthorized use and to authorize dissemination by means of offprints, legitimate photocopies, microform editions, reprints, translations, and secondary information sources, such as abstracting and indexing services including databases. Requests for commercial re-use, use of parts of the publication, and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill nv. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner. Contents Acknowledgements vii List of Contributors viii part 1 A Chronology of Space 1 Searching for Common Ground: Jews and Christians in the Modern Middle East 3 H.L. Murre-van den Berg 2 The Changing Landscape of Muslim-Jewish Relations in the Modern Middle East and North Africa 39 D.J. Schroeter part 2 Arabic and Its Alternatives 3 Standardized Arabic as a Post-Nahḍa Common Ground: Mattai bar Paulus and His Use of Syriac, Arabic, and Garshuni 71 T.C. Baarda 4 Jewish Education in Baghdad: Communal Space vs. Public Space 96 S.R. Goldstein-Sabbah 5 Preserving the Catholics of the Holy Land or Integrating Them into the Palestine Nation (1920–1950)? 121 K.M.J. Sanchez Summerer vi contents part 3 Urban Presence 6 Ottoman Damascus during the Tanzimat: The New Visibility of Religious Distinctions 155 A. Massot 7 The King is Dead, Long Live the King! Jewish Funerary Performances in the Iraqi Public Space 185 A. Schlaepfer 8 Jerusalem between Segregation and Integration: Reading Urban Space through the Eyes of Justice Gad Frumkin 205 Y. Wallach part 4 Transnationalism 9 Refugee Camps and the Spatialization of Assyrian Nationalism in Iraq 237 L. Robson 10 The League of Nations, a-Mandates and Minority Rights during the Mandate Period in Iraq (1920–1932) 258 H. Müller-Sommerfeld 11 “Soundtracks of Jerusalem”: YouTube, North African Rappers, and the Fantasies of Resistance 284 A. Boum Index 311 Acknowledgements The current volume results from a research project funded by the Netherlands Research Council (nwo): Arabic and its Alternatives: Religious Minorities in the Formative Years of the Modern Middle East (1920–1950) whose members organized a conference at Leiden University entitled Common Ground: Chang- ing Interpretations of public space in the Middle East among Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the 19th and 20th Century in October of 2014. The conference was organized in cooperation with the Centre for the Study of Islam and Society (lucis) at Leiden University, and we are grateful for their support in addition to the support of the nwo. We wish to thank nwo in particular for their support in providing the funding for language editing and making the volume avail- able as Open Access so that our work can be shared with the larger academic community. Also to be mentioned in our acknowledgment of thanks is Valerie Joy Turner, our tireless language editor, who endeavored to ensure linguistic coherence and consistency throughout the volume and our student assistant Farah Bazzi, who helped both in the organization of the original conference and the preparation of this volume. Finally, we want to express our gratitude to the whole team of editors at Brill for their cooperation in the preparation of this volume. The editors List of Contributors Sasha Goldstein-Sabbah is a Ph.D. candidate at Leiden University in the Netherlands. She is a member of the Arabic and its Alternatives: Religious Minorities in the Formative Years of the Modern Middle East (1920–1950) research project funded by the Nether- lands Research Council (nwo). Her research interests focus on the history of Jews in the Arab World. Prior to her doctoral research she worked in academic publishing. Anais Massot is a Phd student at Leiden University and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (ehess-Césor). Her Ph.D. research, for which she received a doctoral contract funded by Hesam Université (Paris Nouveaux Mondes) explores inter-confessional relations and political changes in Damascus in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Hannah Müller-Sommerfeld is a scholar of religious studies at the Religionswissenschaftliche Institut of the University of Leipzig. She is specialized on the history and dynamics of religious minorities in the Middle East and Europe. Müller-Sommerfeld wrote her dissertation on the Romanian historian of religions Mircea Eliade. She has published (as Hannelore Müller) furthermore monographs on the modern history of Karaites (2010) and two volumes on various religious communities in the Middle East (2009, 2014). Currently, H. Müller-Sommerfeld is preparing the publication of her post-doctoral research about religion, international politics and law during the monarchy in Iraq. Heleen Murre-van den Berg received her Ph.D. from Leiden University in 1995 and is currently director of the Institute of Eastern Christian Studies at Radboud University, Nijmegen since June 2015. Earlier, she taught history of World Christianity at Leiden Uni- versity. She has published extensively on Christianity in the Middle East, espe- cially on the Syriac/Assyrian traditions and the interactions between Western and Middle Eastern Christians in the period from 1500 onwards. The current volume results from a research project funded for by the Netherlands Research Council (nwo): Arabic and its Alternatives: Religious Minorities in the Forma- tive Years of the Modern Middle East (1920–1950). list of contributors ix Laura Robson received her Ph.D. from Yale University and is currently Associate Professor of modern Middle Eastern history at Portland State University in Portland, Ore- gon. Her research focuses primarily on histories of ethnic and religious minori- ties in the twentieth century Arab world. She is the author of Colonialism and Christianity in Mandate Palestine (University of Texas Press, 2011) and editor of Minorities and the Modern Arab World: New Perspectives (Syracuse Univer- sity Press, 2016). Her articles have appeared in a number of scholarly journals, including the Journal of Palestine Studies, Comparative Studies of South Asia Africa and the Middle East, the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth His- tory, First World War Studies, History Compass, and Mashriq and Mahjar. She is currently working on a book investigating the history of ethnically based population transfers and partitions across Iraq, Syria, and Palestine during the interwar period. Aline Schlaepfer holds a Ph.D. in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Geneva. She was a visiting research student at the School of Oriental and African Studies in Lon- don, and a lecturer at the University of Geneva. She was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship by the Swiss National Science Foundation and is now a research affil- iate at the American University of Beirut (cames), where she currently lives. Her research interest focuses on modern Arab intellectual history,